I married a traveller, a man with an unquenchable hunger to see the world. He
married a woman who gets seasick and hates flying. So what follows is a
typical conversation in our house.

Him: “You know where we should go for half-term?”

Me: “Lakeland. We’re running low on ziplock food bags.”

“I was thinking New Orleans.”

“Oh. Bugger.”

You can see my point, though. Going to New Orleans for ziplock food bags is a
profligate and futile enterprise, what with flights and car hire. Even if we
stayed in budget hotels it wasn’t going to be cheap. But despite my best
efforts, we and our two teenage kids ended up doing a road trip of the Deep
South... in a week. And I’m not exaggerating when I say it changed our
lives.

We flew into Atlanta, Georgia, and gave ourselves an easy first day’s drive to
Peachtree City. Peachtree is a pleasant commuter town known, somewhat
bafflingly, for its electric golf carts. Go to its tourist website and
that’s the first thing you’ll see. There’s even a promotional video called
Discover Life at 15mph. When I asked a local if this was part of some green
initiative, he looked a little puzzled.

“Well, yes, come to think of it — I guess there’s that too,” he said, as
though nobody before had ever looked for a reason beyond the sheer fun of
riding around in golf carts. Given that we had 1,000 miles to cover in a
week, we opted to stick with the rental car for the next leg to Montgomery,
Alabama.

Montgomery is the state capital and played a central part in the history of
both the Civil War and the civil rights movement. Confederate president
Jefferson Davis had his version of the White House here for a few months in
1861, and its elegant State Capitol building, glittering at the head of a
broad boulevard, is within sight of the much more modest Dexter Avenue King
Memorial Baptist Church, whose charismatic pastor was Dr Martin Luther King.

You don’t need all the details — this is a travel piece, and that’s what
Wikipedia is for — but the marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 were a
crucial stepping stone to black people getting the vote in America.

Our guide for a tour of the church, Wanda Battle, is not only one of the
finest you could wish for (though there are a couple more coming up — we
struck tour-guide gold), but is also simply a radiant person. When I said
this trip was life-changing, I meant it: it brought home to this cosseted,
middle-class white family the realities not just of hatred, bigotry and
oppression, but also of love, hope and forgiveness. Wanda got the four of us
singing We Shall Overcome in front of Dr King’s pulpit, and there were tears
in all our eyes. At the end of the holiday, I asked my daughter for her
highlight, and without hesitation she said “meeting Wanda Battle”. (Book
your own tour at dexterkingmemorial.org.)

The next day brought us another legend. Selma, a sweet town that feels like
it’s been roughed up by poverty, summed up what it was that needed to be
overcome. We entered it via the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where, in March 1965,
the civil-rights marchers were blocked by state troopers. The violence that
followed gave the date of the aborted march its nickname, Bloody Sunday.

This event, and the broader struggle for voting rights, is commemorated in a
splendid museum, the National Voting Rights Museum (£4.60; nvrmi.com).
But it was at the smaller Ancient Africa Enslavement & Civil War Museum
where we met inspirational tour guide number two. Annie Pearl Avery was on
those Selma marches; indeed, she was the only person jailed on Bloody
Sunday. And now here she was showing us (and only us — where are all the
tourists in Selma?) around and retelling her experiences. We were
face-to-face with history — one of the footsoldiers of the civil rights
movement (£4.20; aaecwm.com).

It was time for a little light relief, and where better for that than New
Orleans? We holed up for a few days in a boutique hotel called Le Marais, in
the heart of the French Quarter (doubles from £133; hotel
lemarais.com). New Orleans was everything we hoped: noisy and buzzy,
with jaw-dropping architecture and live music everywhere. There are elegant
restaurants such as Antoine’s, where escargot sit side-by-side with creole
gumbo (mains from £19; antoines.com);
independent clothes shops such as the sumptuous Fleur de Paris on Royal
Street (fleur deparis.net);
and, of course, jazz. We headed to Frenchman Street, because that, we were
told, is where the locals get their fix. And the Uptown Jazz Orchestra at
the Snug Harbor club knocked our socks off (snugjazz.com).

The next day promised a full day’s excursion with Tours by Isabelle (from
£60pp; toursbyisabelle.com).
We were reluctant, as none of us really wanted to leave the city, but it was
more than worth it. It began with a boat ride across the bayou, stopping to
gaze at sleeping alligators. Then we were driven to a pair of plantations,
where we could trace the civil-rights story back to its roots in slavery. At
the Laura plantation, we met inspirational guide No3. Madison sat us all
down on benches in a cramped and spartan slave cabin, and spoke with
intelligence and passion about the harsh and hopeless lives that would have
been endured here.

Next day, it was time to head back to Atlanta across the Lake Pontchartrain
Causeway — at 24 miles, the longest continuous bridge over water anywhere in
the world. On the far side, in Mandeville, we stopped for lunch at Liz’s
Where Y’at Diner, which serves, according to my kids, the best barbecue
sauce known to man (burgers from £6; lizswhereyatdiner.com).

And that was it. In one week we’d visited four states, learned more about
slavery and disenfranchisement than we could ever have discovered from
books, and met some truly wonderful people. I even bought some ziplock bags.
We had to bring the barbecue sauce back in something.

The brief

Flights
Fly to Atlanta with airlines including Virgin Atlantic, British Airways and
Delta from about £700 return.

Packages
America and Canada As You Like It can arrange a similar fly-drive trip to
Rebecca’s from £1,039pp for six nights, including flights, car hire and two
nights at Le Marais hotel (020 8742 8299; americaasyoulikeit.com).
Or try Bon Voyage (0800 980 7093, bon-voyage.co.uk)
or Trailfinders (020 7368 1200, trailfinders.com).